About Me

After college and the army, I studied acting and theater; I have an MFA in Acting and uncompleted Ph.D. in Performance Studies (ABD). I have worked as an actor, director, dramaturg/literary advisor, critic/reviewer, essayist, editor, and teacher of theater and acting (studio/conservatory, college, high school, and middle school). Several years ago, some theater friends who don't live in New York anymore asked me to keep them informed about what I see and I began sending them detailed, opinionated e-mails.

14 March 2016

Calvino Is To The Mind What Exercise Is To The Body (Part 1)

[I read some of Italo Calvino’s books back in the ’80s
and I wrote about them for various reasons.
Calvino, as you’ll discover, is a totally unique writer, so I decided it
would be interesting to post those old pieces on a writer I don’t hear much
about anymore, even though in his lifetime he was considered a likely Nobel Prize-winner
in literature. (The Nobel rules don’t permit posthumous awards, so when Calvino
died at 61, he became one of those astonishing artists who never made it to Stockholm.) Of his own work, he said: “The conflict
between the world’s choices and man’s obsession with making sense of them is a
recurrent pattern in what I’ve written.”
I think you’ll see evidence of this in the books I discuss in this
article.

[Covering some of Calvino’s background and two of his books, Cosmicomics
and If on a winter’s night a traveler,
turned into a rather long article, so I’m publishing it in two parts. Part 1, below, contains the writer’s bio and
my remarks on Cosmicomics, a
collection of astounding short tales. (I
won’t say more about them now; I’ll let you discover how remarkable I think
they are when you read about them in the second section of this post.) Part 2, to be published in a few days, will
be devoted to my report on the novella If on a winters night a traveler, in its own way as unique as Cosmicomics. I’ll
only say that the like of neither book has come to my attention in my now 69
years. Maybe you’ll agree. ~Rick]

Italian novelist, short story writer, and journalist
Italo Calvino (1923-85) was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, near Havana. His parents, Mario and Eva, were essentially
Italian expatriates, moving first to Mexico in 1909 and then, during the Mexican
Revolution (1910-20), to Cuba in 1917.
Calvino has characterized his father as an anarchist in his youth, a
follower of Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist aristocrat. Mario Calvino, an agronomist and botanist,
then became a socialist reformist, a movement that believed in gradual change
from within (as opposed to violent revolution from without). Eva, also a botanist, was a university
professor. In 1925, when Italo was not
yet two, the family returned to Italy and settled on a small farm in San Remo
on the Mediterranean coast. Floriano
Calvino, Italo’s younger bother (who later became a distinguished geologist),
was born there in 1927. Calvino’s
parents maintained their political radicalism, espousing the tenets of
Freemasonry, anarchism, and Marxism, becoming intense opponents of the National
Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini (elected Italy’s prime minister in
1922).

Mario and Eva Calvino were also believers in science
over both religion and the humanities such as literature. They inculcated in their children a life-long
interest in science and nature (though, obviously, they didn’t dissuade Italo
from eventually going into the humanities.)
The Calvinos refused to have their sons educated in the Italian Catholic
schools, sending young Italo first to an English nursery school and then to a
Protestant elementary school; his secondary schooling was at a state-run lyceum
where he was exempted from religious classes at his parents’ request. The family farm, however, was thickly planted
with trees—Mario was a pioneer in growing fruit then considered exotic such as grapefruits
and avocados—and the Calvino boys would climb up into a tree’s branches to read
their favorite stories—one of Italo’s was Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. This displeased the older Calvinos no less
than Italo’s fascination with American movies, humor magazines, comics, and
cartoons.

He was also captivated by poetry, theater, and especially
drawing; before he ever wrote anything, he was drawing caricatures of his
friends and schoolmates. Calvino’s first
published piece, when he was 11, was a drawing.
When he started to write, he illustrated his own work—but decided that
his drawing lacked style and he abandoned it completely. The nascent writer listened avidly to the
radio, which he felt was one of his links to the outside world, and he heard
many radio plays. Theater, he said, was
his passion at that age, and when he turned to writing, at around 16, his first
attempts were plays. After World War II,
Calvino found that Italian theater was barren, he asserted, but fiction in
Italy was booming, so he shifted his focus from plays to stories.

Calvino’s mother was able postpone Italo’s entry
into the Fascist Party’s youth brigade, but he eventually had to sign up and
was forced to participate in Mussolini’s invasion of the French Riviera in 1940,
before the boy was even 17. The
following year, Italo matriculated at the University of Turin in the
agriculture department (where his father had previously taught agronomy),
suppressing his literary ambitions to please his parents. In 1943, Calvino transferred to the
University of Florence, but by the end of that year, the Italians having
overthrown Mussolini (who was later executed), Nazi Germany had occupied his
home province and Calvino, refusing to join the military, went into
hiding. He continued to read extensively
but, deciding that among the partisan groups the communists were the best
organized, with his mother’s encouragement, he joined the Garibaldi Brigades of
the Italian resistance in 1944. Because
Calvino had refused to join the puppet regime’s military, his parents were held
hostage by the Nazis in their home; he recorded that the SS captors had three
times pretended to shoot his father while his mother was forced to watch. Calvino fought with the resistance until the
Allied liberation of Italy in 1945.

After the war, Calvino settled in Turin and returned
to university. He abandoned agriculture
for the arts, however. In 1945, he
published his first story, “Gone to Headquarters,” a tale based on his
experiences in the resistance. (Though
I’m using the English titles of Calvino’s works, the dates are all for the
original Italian publication.) The war
had also strengthened his commitment to communism and he joined the Italian
Communist Party and became active in post-war Italian politics as a supporter
of the workers’ movement. When he
graduated with a master’s degree in 1947, he went to work in the publishing house
Einaudi, which had been a center of anti-Fascism before the war. Not only did this short stint give Calvino a
grounding in the world of book publishing (which we’ll see he drew upon for his
novel If on a winter’s night a traveler,
which I’ll discuss in the latter half of this article), including the press and
advertising, but it also introduced the young writer to many leftist
intellectuals, among whom he found his closest friends and mentors. When he left Einaudi, he went to work as a
journalist for L’Unità, the communist
daily in Italy. That same year, Calvino
published his first novel, The Path to
the Nest of Spiders, the initial work in his neorealist period, which won a
prestigious literary award and sold 5,000 copies, an impressive showing in
post-war Italy. (Italian Neorealism was
a literary movement that flourished after World War II, dealing realistically
with the events leading up to the war and with the social problems that were
engendered during the period and afterwards.
Some critics have proposed that Calvino’s attention to detail, eye for
symmetry, and scientific detachment were the consequence of his growing up in
the home of two scientists.) The next
year, Calvino got to interview one of his literary idols, Earnest Hemingway.

A collection of stories about the war, The Crow Comes Last, was released in
1949, after which Calvino returned to Einaudi, which had been publishing his
literary work, in 1951. He became a
consulting editor, which allowed him to develop his own writing and to discover
new authors. He also became a “reader of
texts,” another important aspect of If on
a winter’s night a traveler. Also in
1951, to enhance his position in the communist party, Calvino traveled to the
Soviet Union as a correspondent for L’Unità;
his articles and correspondence from that stay, published in 1952, were awarded the Saint-Vincent Prize for journalism.
While he was in Moscow, however, he learned of the 1951 death of his
father at the age of 76.

Between 1947 and 1954, Calvino published three new
novels, but none was particularly well received. They’d all been written in a realistic style,
continuing his work from his first book.
But Calvino had grown dissatisfied and uncomfortable with what he’d been
doing and taking stock after the second of the three books (Youth in Turin, 1950–1951), he produced the
novella The Cloven Viscount in 1952. He’d concluded that he should cease writing
the kind of books he was expected to write and create the kind of work he liked
to read. The new novel, which brought
Calvino international recognition, was a combination of fable, fantasy, and
allegory and the writer became recognized as a modern fabulist, the genre in
which he wrote for most of the rest of his life. In 1954, the writer had been commissioned by
Einaudi to compile a collection of Italian folk stories in emulation of the
famous German tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm; it was published as Italian Folk Tales (1956) and in his
preparation for composing the book, Calvino read such works as Morphology of
the Folktale and Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales by Vladimir Propp which confirmed for
Calvino his own ideas on the form.

During this period,
Calvino continued his work with communist and party publications. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in
1956, he became disillusioned and resigned from the Italian Communist Party in
1957. Part of his decision was also
based on the revelation of Stalin’s crimes during his tenure as Soviet
communist party boss. From that point
forward, Calvino ceased his active political participation and refused to
become a member of any other political party.
When the party and his supporters within it withdrew their support of
the publication of a story that was a satirical allegory about the party’s inertia and
aversion to change, Calvino found outlets for his short pieces in
various other journals of literature and general interest. He became co-editor, with Elio Vittorini, who
had published Calvino’s first story back in 1945, of Il Menabò, a left-leaning
cultural journal. His next novel, TheBaron in the Trees, was published in 1957.

For six months in
1959-1960, Calvino visted the U.S. on the invitation of the Ford
Foundation. (This was somewhat unusual
during the Cold War era because people holding pro-communist views were
routinely denied visas. I suspect that
Ford brought sufficient influence to bear to get the Italian writer an
exception to the practice.) Though Calvino
went to California and the South, he spent four months of his trip in New York
City and found himself enamored of the city.
His letters to Einaudi about his travels were published as “American
Diary 1959-1960” in Hermit in Paris in 2003.

During a 1964 trip to Havana, Calvino married Argentinean
translatorEsther Judith Singer, whom he’d met in 1962. He’d gone to Cuba to visit his birthplace and
while there, he met Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a hero to revolutionary communists
the world over. Guevara was killed in
Bolivia on 9 October 1967 and a few days later, Calvino composed a tribute to
the Argentine-born revolutionary which was published in Cuba in 1968 and in
Italy in 1998.

After his Cuban wedding, Calvino and his new wife
settled in Rome; their daughter Giovanna was born there in 1965. He returned to work for Einaudi and began
writing Cosmicomics, a collection of
stories that each takes a scientific or mathematical “fact” (though some by
today’s knowledge are not true) around which Calvino creates a fanciful narrative. Originally serialized in Il Caffè,
a literary magazine, before being published as a collection in 1965. (I’ll be outlining this book a little further
on in this article.)

After the death of his friend and mentor Vittorini
in 1966, which affected Calvino a great deal, the writer and his family moved to
Paris in 1967, just ahead of the cultural upheavals that included the massive student
uprising of May 1968 in the City of Light.
Invited to join a group of experimental writers in 1968, he met Roland
Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss who would be influential in Calvino’s future
work. That same year, he rejected the Viareggio
Prize for Time and the Hunter (1967)
because he frowned on the institution making the award. He accepted two other awards, however, in the
following years.

In the early ’70s. Calvino continued publishing
short stories, including “The Burning of the Abominable House” in the Italian
edition of Playboy in 1973, and
contributing articles to Italian periodicals, becoming a regular contributor to
Corriere della Sera, an important
daily paper in Milan. (A voice of the
Fascist Party during Mussolini’s regime, the paper became staunchly
anti-communist and pro-NATO after the war and aimed at a readership in the
upper and middle classes of post-war Italian society.) In 1975, the writer was named an honorary
member of the prestigious American Academy in Rome and received the Austrian
State Prize for European Literature in 1976.
He traveled to Japan, Mexico, and the U.S., where he delivered a series
of lectures in several cities. His later
novels, including If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), employed innovative
structures and shifting points of view to explore chance, coincidence, and
change.

The writer’s mother, Eva, died in 1978 at 92 and
Calvino sold the family farm in San Remo; he and his wife and children moved to
Rome in 1980. In 1981, he was awarded
the French Légion d’honeur and was appointed jury president for that year’s
Venice Film Festival. In the summer of
1985, he was working on a series of six lectures for delivery at Harvard in the
fall, but on the night of 6 September he was admitted to the hospital with a
cerebral hemorrhage and died during the night of 18-19 September. The lectures were published posthumously in
Italian in 1988 and then in 1993 in English under the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In his lifetime, Italo Calvino won many
literary and writing awards and prizes; had he not died unexpectedly at the age
of only 61, most scholars agree, he’d have won the Nobel Prize for Literature
eventually.

Given that Italo Calvino is one of the world’s most
unusual, not to say idiosyncratic, writers whose work astonished me when I
first encountered it, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at two of
his books. Clearly one of Italy’s most esteemed
writers—in his lifetime, he was one of the most translated authors in world
literature—Calvino blended fantasy, humor, and fable to illuminate 20th-century
life. At the same time, he gave new
dimensions to the novel and the story. Upon learning of Calvino’s death,
writer John Updike commented, “He took fiction into new places where it had
never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of
narrative.” First I’ll look at a
collection of stories, Cosmicomics (Le
cosmicomiche), which I noted earlier was first published serially in an
Italian magazine. I can tell you that
the stories were unlike anything I’ve ever read, before or since. (I’m not even sure I can describe them
succinctly or accurately. But I’ll try.)

The second book is If on a winter’s night a traveler (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore), which has its own
peculiarities. I won’t précis it here, so I’ll only say it draws on the
writer’s experience in the world of books, publishers, and readers.

* *
* *

COSMICOMICS

(4
April 1985)

Originally published as a series of
stories in an Italian magazine in 1965 and then as a book in Italy the same
year, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (Harcourt Brace, 1968) was translated
by William Weaver, who became Calvino’s regular English translator. After an earlier translator had disappointed
the author, as Weaver tells the story, Calvino met Weaver in Rome and they
struck up an acquaintance. Calvino asked
Weaver bluntly if the American would like to translate his new book. Intrigued, even though he hadn’t read the
book yet, Weaver agreed.

Out of curiosity, Weaver wondered why
his predecessor had been fired. “One of
the stories in the volume was called ‘Without Colors,’” Weaver recounted. “In an excess of misguided originality, the
translator had entitled the piece ‘In Black and White.’ Calvino’s letter of dismissal pointed out that
black and white are colors.” This
collaboration was obviously a success as far as Calvino was concerned since
Weaver went on to translate many of the Italian author’s works into English—but
the translator’s intervention in the American publishing process almost
scuttled the release of Cosmicomics
altogether:

The American editor who commissioned
it changed jobs just as I was finishing, and—on my unfortunate advice—Calvino
followed him to his new firm. But then
the editor committed suicide, the new house turned down Cosmicomics,
the old house wouldn’t have us back, and the book was adrift. It was rejected by other publishers, until
Helen Wolff at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich accepted it . . . .

The book went on to garner excellent
reviews and the National Book Award for translation, and Harcourt Brace became
Calvino’s long-time American publisher.
(All the stories in Cosmicomics
plus those in a later collection, narrated
by the same ever-present character as Cosmicomics, called t
zero (1967), along
with some others, were republished as The Complete Cosmicomics [Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2014].)

Cosmicomics
is a collection of 12
allegorical fantasy short stories. The
author’s chosen subjects, which include evolution, the distance from the earth to
the moon, life as a mollusk, the last dinosaurs, messages from space, are
handled with sharp wit and imagination. No
less a literary figure than Salman Rushdie, a dab hand at fantastical stories
himself, deemed Cosmicomics “possibly
the most enjoyable story collection ever written, a book that will frequently
make you laugh out loud at its mischievous mastery, capricious ingenuity and
nerve.”

The narrative, told by “old Qfwfq” about
his childhood and members of his family circle in a series of anecdotal scenes,
most very short, is set in an allegorical prehistoric past—primordial earth. Qfwfq, an eyewitness to the creation of the
universe who takes on different forms in each story—a speck of cosmic
dust, a dinosaur, a seashell, and a
caveman, among others—relates a first-hand account of the birth of the cosmos. Drawing on his interest in science, Calvino has
invented his own creation myth, mixing whimsical character traits with both
apparently accurate scientific or mathematical facts, presented as an epigraph
at the start of each tale, and complete fantasy. (One critic, Jonathan Lethem in the New York Times Book Review, quipped: “Someone teach these
books in Kansas, please—Darwin’s foes would be drowned in epiphanies.) “The formation of the solar system,” observes
sci-fi critic Ryan Britt on Tor.com,
a science fiction blog, “is described less like a stellar event and more like a
family gathering, which slowly breaks up.”

The author has turned the formulae,
molecules, and cells of creation into personalities. Many of the characters,
some carried over from one tale to the next, are of varying ages, types, and
descriptions. All anthropomorphized
non-humans, they’re allegorical and symbolic in the same sense that characters
in the Bible and Greek or Norse myths are, though they have more contemporary
personality traits than those ancient legends, infused, as reviewer Ted Gioia
puts it on The Millions website, with
“all the foibles and fancies of humans.” They represent elements in the formation of
the universe, the earth, and life.

The language, even in translation, is
poetic, lyrical, semi-colloquial, and some of it, particularly names, is clearly
meant only to be read on a page, not spoken, since it’s written as
unpronounceable chains of consonants with diacritical marks and superscripts. (How would you pronounce Qfwfq? Or Ursula H’x? How about Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 or G’d(w)n?) “Science fiction collides with wordplay on
these pages,” writes Britt, “while a madman’s wit keeps the course steady.”

It’s not really possible to synopsize Cosmicomics accurately; you have to read
it yourself. Nevertheless, I’ll give it
a try—as long as everyone understands that these stories depend a lot in your
individual take.

“The Distance of the Moon” This is probably the best-known story in the
collection. Calvino takes the fact that
the Moon used to be much closer to the Earth, and conjures a tale about people
who used to climb up a ladder from the Earth to the Moon to collect the Moon
Milk. The ending is a little sad because
some lovers drift apart as the Moon recedes from the Earth.

“At Daybreak” Old Qfwfq remembers the birth of the solar
system.

“A Sign in Space” Because the Sun takes a long time to go around
the Galaxy, Qwfwq creates a sign so that once the sun has made its complete
revolution, he can have an indication of his existence, “a point of reference.” But by the time the Sun has come around to
its starting point, Qwfwq forgets what his sign looks like. In the interim, the world also evolves and
life has begun so that when Qwfwq finally does find his sign, he doesn’t recognize
it. He concludes that “space didn’t
exist and perhaps had never existed.”

“All at One Point” At the beginning of the universe, all matter
and creation used to exist in a single point. “Naturally, we were all there—old Qfwfq
said—where else could we have been? Nobody
knew then that there could be space,” Calvino starts this tale. “Or time either: what use did we have for
time, packed in there like sardines?”
Qwfwq goes on to describe what it was like when everything was contained
in a single point.

“Without Colors” Before there was an atmosphere, everything was
“a dead, uniform gray,” like the Moon. When
a meteorite passes in front of the Sun, colors appear as the atmosphere
envelops the Earth. The change frightens
Ayl, Qfwfq’s new love interest, and she hides from Qwfwq and this strange, new
world.

“Games Without End” Qwfwq and his childhood friend Pfwfp play a cosmic
game of marbles with hydrogen atoms, back when the universe was forming new
hydrogen particles every 250 million years or so. But the game turns into one of chase, as
Qfwfq, in his galaxy, pursues Pfwfp, who in turn in his galaxy is chasing Qfwfq
in an endless circuit around curved space.

“The Aquatic Uncle” With “the water period . . . coming to an end,”
creatures left the sea and went to live on land. Qwfwq’s family was living on land except for
their great-uncle N’ba N’ga who still lived as a fish, refusing to come ashore
like “civilized” people. There’s even a
social hierarchy, between the land-dwellers and the water-dwellers, and even
among the land-dwellers, with the more-evolved beings who came out of the water
in the earliest period, such as Lll, Qwfwq’s fiancée, and her family, and those
who came later and aren’t as advanced, like Qfwfq himself and his family. When Qfwfq introduces Lll to his uncle, he’s
confused that they take to each other so strongly, and, sadly, Qfwq eventually
loses his terrestrial fiancée to his aquatic uncle as Lll returns to a life
under water.

“How Much Shall We Bet” One theory of galactic evolution states that “the
galaxies, the solar system, the Earth, cellular life could not help but be born,”
that the cosmic developments were inevitable. But Qwfwq and his fellows couldn’t have known that, so he and his friend Dean (k)yK began betting on the long-term evolution
of the universe. Of course, as Qfwfq
explains, they didn’t really know what was going on in the universe, or what
any of it would lead to. They “also
didn't know what we were staking because there was nothing that could serve as
a stake, and so we gambled on our word, keeping an account of the bets each had
won, to be added up later.” For Qfwfq
and (k)yK, the cosmos was like an intergalactic Las Vegas: they could bet on
anything. And did. As the universe evolves, and life on Earth
develops, some of the bets become very specific: historical events, sports
events, people’s life choices, and so on.
In the end, (k)yK says to Qfwfq: “‘You know something, Qfwfq? The closing quotations on Wall Street are down
2 per cent, not 6! And that building
constructed illegally on the Via Cassia is twelve stories high, not nine! Nearco IV wins at Longchamps by two lengths. What’s our score now, Qfwfq?’”

“The Dinosaurs” Qfwfq explains that some Dinosaurs lived after
most of them became extinct, and the “New Ones” have become the new masters of
the planet. He recounts how it felt to
be the last existing Dinosaur, accepted by the proto-mammals, who have no
memory of what Dinosaurs looked like, as
“The Ugly One.” Erroneous myths and
legends about Dinosaurs grew up among the New Ones, not knowing that the Ugly
One was, in fact, a Dinosaur himself. Among
the several themes Calvino treats in this story, one strikes me for its
pertinence to right now: during a discussion of Dinosaurs, one of Qfwfq’s
adoptive neighbors states, “I’m against anybody when we don’t know who gave him
birth or where he came from, and when he wants to eat our food and court our
sisters. . . .” Does that sound like anyone we all know?

“The Form of Space” As the unnamed narrator—this is one of the two
tales told by someone not named as Qfwfq (though the tone is no different that
those in which he figures)—falls through space, he cannot help but notice that
his trajectory is parallel to that of a beautiful woman, Ursula H’x, and that
of Lieutenant Fenimore, who is also in love with Ursula. The story-teller dreams of the shape of space
changing, so that he may touch Ursula (or fight with Lieutenant Fenimore). The whole episode takes place inside the
narrator’s mind as the three figures never actually communicate except, perhaps
in the teller’s imagination.

“The Light Years” The second unnamed narrator, looking through
his telescope at other galaxies, spots one with a sign pointed right at him reading
“I SAW YOU.” Given that there’s a gulf
of a hundred million light-years, even before he checks his diary, the narrator
recalls that it was something he had always tried to hide. Then he starts to worry, particularly about
what others who had seen the sign, might be thinking. Concerned for his reputation, the
story-teller responds with his own sign, and soon the universe above becomes a
literal multi-party conversation by signs in space. Despite the fact that each round of discourse
takes two hundred million years to occur, in the narrator’s telling, it’s a
feverish exchange.

“The Spiral” Returning to Qfwfq as our guide, he recounts
his life as a mollusk. At first, Qwfwq
is an eyeless mollusk clinging to a rock in the sea, just sucking up
nourishment. Eventually, he senses the
presence of female mollusks, and though he can’t see them, he falls in love with
one and his new-found awareness beyond himself inspires him to create a
beautiful spiral shell. Though none of his
fellow mollusks can see it, his shell sends out vibrations which eventually make
them develop eyes and evolve generally. Qfwfq’s
creativity prompts the emergence “five hundred millions years” later of the pyramids
and Egyptian airlines, Spinoza and the “Spinoza” entry in a Dutch encyclopedia,
a Neolithic mattock buried into a field and the mattock of the peasant that
unburies it, Herodotus and those who read him in bilingual editions, a cloud of
bees, coal, horoscopes, Cleopatra, and films about Cleopatra.

The chief attraction of Cosmicomics, at least for me, is the wonderful
mix of science and whimsy, the off-the-wall imagination, the very idea of it
all. Critic Gioia calls it “a kind of
Einsteinian magical realism.” I don’t
know if there’s anything remotely like this out there, but I’ve never read any. Well, maybe one, when I was a little
boy—Calvino’s tales of the formation of the universe are a little like a more
sophisticated take on Rudyard Kipling’s Just
So Stories—except based on some scientific truths. This is about the freshest, most imaginative, wackiest,
most engaging material I’ve ever read.
For me, it’s reminiscent in appeal (though not in style or content) of Theodore
White’s The Once and Future King when I was 12 and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ring
Trilogy back in the ’70s. (J. K.
Rowling’s Potter books probably come pretty close, too.)

[My initial contact with Cosmicomics and Italo Calvinohappened when I was working with a woman who was starting a theater
company and wanted to find new and original material that might be adaptable
for performance. She assigned me to read
Cosmicomics and report on its
suitability for stage adaptation; that 1985 report is the basis of this
section. That theater was never launched
and the adaptation my boss contemplated was never written, but, despite the
obvious difficulties in turning Calvino’s stories into performance texts—pronouncing
the names is only the most obvious—there have been some stage presentations of
this material. The most recent of them
included two 2014 productions: a multimedia adaptation by Ildiko Nemeth for
Dixon Place and the New Stage Theatre Company in New York City and a rendering by
Sky Candy in Austin, Texas , directed by Rudy Ramirez.

[Now I invite you come back to ROT in a few days to read Part 2 of this
article and see what I have to say about what some critics deem Calvino’s
masterwork, If on a winters night a traveler.]